"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae
tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..."
"...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32)
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Tuesday, March 28, 2006

DICTIONARY DAZE: The headline of today's dead tree edition of the Middletown (N.Y.) Times Herald Record reads, "Should Illegal Immigration Be A Crime," a statement that causes no end of cognitive dissonance among those of us with access to a dictionary, since it makes us all wonder if the word illegal has some shade of meaning that we've missed somehow. I was under the impression that illegal immigration was immigration in violation of the law, and that violating the law and illegality were more or less the same thing, and that both states were synonomous with committing a crime. I could be wrong about that, of course; I make no claims to omniscience here. Apropos absolutely nothing at all, which means that the following has nothing really to do with the subject so far, in 2005, no fewer than 2,361 Americans had surgery to enhance their buttocks. That's right, 2,361 of our fellow Americans put on weight, usually a phenomenon Americans wish to avoid, so that the fat they put on their bellies could be injected into their backsides at a later date. While it is too early to predict what the long term consequences of such surgery might be, I think we here at The Passing Parade can safely predict that the end of Western civilization as we now know it is at hand and we had all better buy unbrellas while they are still making them. No, I don't know what that means.